The Foxer

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While there’s no truth whatsoever in the rumour that the defoxing annexe was built on top of an old Native American burial ground, a few weeks back when we were digging a hole for a Pickett-Hamilton Fort by the front gate, we did unearth:

Foxer Fact #1102

During the early 1930s, a period when competition between British flying circuses was at its fiercest, finale ‘turns’ grew increasingly elaborate and dangerous. Freddie ‘The Foxer’ Foxmorton’s outfit, The Aerocrats, routinely ended their shows with something called The Tally-Ho – a rollicking low-level fox hunt in which an orange Gloster Gamecock piloted by Foxmorton was chased over a series of specially erected hedges and through a mock barn, by a jostling crowd of Avro 504s and DH.60 Moths. On September 9, 1934, the stunt ended in tragedy when the Gamecock collided with a spooked pheasant. The ensuing six aircraft pile-up cost two pilots their lives and Foxmorton – who, amazingly, emerged with barely a scratch – his performer’s licence. After his next venture, an air taxi business, went belly up in ’36, ‘The Foxer’ left for Spain to fly for the Republicans (see Foxer Fact #848).

I can’t work out what the background building is. I’m presuming it’s an architectural drawing of a building based on what look like trees to the left and bottom left, otherwise it looks like worked metal.

There’s also the difference in shades of colour across the image. But I can’t think of a flag – other than Nigeria – that has the same columns of colour either side of a second colour in the middle.

The background image looks a bit like a map (there appear to be trees in the left bottom corner), but the buildings (?) are far too neat for my liking. Even if it is a map, I have no idea what is is of.

It think it’s a city, perhaps an uncompleted plan. If you look by the tail of the Maryland you can see a roundabout (well, it’s probably a memorial, but if it does exist, it’s probably a roundabout now).

No suicide for Johann Sebastian Bach, though. And while K-129 imploded and sank, I don’t think we can generalize from that that any Golf class submarine is suicidal. I suspect there is a better solution, somewhere out there.

Goering stood trial there, of course.
Erich von dem BACH-Zelewski testified against his superiors.
Google is finding references to “Nuremberg Eagles”.
I think there might be a street named Edmund-Rumpler-Weg in Nürnberg/Nuremberg.
Martin Behaim was born in Nuremberg – that being the Martin Maryland link? There might be a Nuremberg link with Martin Luther, as well.

Taking Tim’s recommendation of considering the ‘bigger picture’ literally – in the Bond & Bianca photo, they are posing with the Bede BD-5J (“Acrostar Jet”) featured in the opening sequence of Octopussy.

A BD-5J is apparently Guinness record holder for the world’s smallest jet.

And this is where it all gets tenuous: the bus in the picture could well be a variant in length or width; Bond and Biance were trying to steal a secret Cuban spy plane which I assume was a modification of an existing plane, to make it look authentic; the board game card I’m not sure about either, it’s referring to the U.S. and is in French so possibly a French version of an American game; the background image looked like a possible iteration/integration of Bentham’s panopticon but I still have no idea what it actually is, for the sake of argument I’ll say it’s some form of iteration on a previous design; and then Goering…he was the only Reichsmarschall of the Second World War, a rank that had previously existed in the 11th Century, according to our old friend ).

Sid is Canadian, I didn’t know that, the game card might be a reference to that. The text is in French and the card title seems to refer to the U.S.(A?) so maybe it’s from a game about the invasion of Canada?